It's a blog about Jesus Christ Superstar (2000).It's just to learn and enjoy.If you haven't seen it...Watch it and tell us.

Monday, April 17, 2006

This Jesus must die

This is the conspiracy of the priests against Jesus.The contrast is shown by light and shadows, colour and black.The faces of the priests are illuminated upwards,with light coming from the table, doing them more pathetic and terrifying .

They justify themselves saying that it is better that one man, Jesus, dies instead of everybody.They are worried about how to stop him because his enchantment is increasing but they didn´t dare because they compare Him with John, the Baptiste.Finally they decide he must die. In fact ,they protect their own heads from the power of Rome.

4 Comments:

Hi, Del Valle students!You've been doing great work here, congratulations! and special claps for your teacher, Susana, who I met last summer as we both worked together to learn how to help you use computers to learn English better.

I saw this musical many many years ago (secret: then I was just a little older than you're now!) and am afraid I can't remember much, except for the impact it made on me!

Nevertheless, one line in your posting strongly called my attention: "saying that it is better that one man, Jesus, dies instead of everybody". It reminded me of a debate I had with one of my classes this week, after we had all watched the movie "Swordfish" (starring John Travolta). Have you seen it? We looked for arguments to support this idea as well as to "counter-argue"... Have you realised how difficult it is to show this argument is wrong if you think "mathematically"? ;-)I'll invite my students to visit your blog, perhaps they can contribute some interesting thoughts!

Lucio, it is apparent from your description of the Opera scene "This Jesus Must Die" that it is much more dramatic and sinister than in the movie version.

To tell you the truth, it has never been very clear to me what the reason was that the priests wanted Jesus gone, other than he was becoming more popular than they were. They wanted to regain control of the people, but had no legal charges to justify killing him. Do you remember how Jesus was bounced around to Herod and then Pilate? Nobody had jurisdiction, and even Pilate realized he had no grounds to put Jesus to death. The flogging was to appease the crowd, which by then had turned against Jesus. But when Pilate saw that Jesus was resigned to his fate of dying for man's sins, he gave in and allowed the crucifixion the crowd clamoured for to occur. A very dramatic scene in the movie shows Pilate literally "washing his hands" of the matter.

Well, this is a difficult topic to deal with. First of all I want to say that I totally agree with what the 'Anonimous user' has written. It's true that maybe the priests wanted Jesus to die because they wanted to regain control of the people, and Jesus kind of stopped them if they had left him alive. I suppose that if Jesus was alive nowadays he would be chased by priests in some way or another. And of course then everybody would 'wash their hands off' the matter as Pilate did at that time.I don't know what to say, it's not better that one man dies instead of everybody as it is not that everybody dies instead of one man, the greatest thing would be to say that nobody should die at all. I don't support the view that the misfortune of one person is preferable rather than the misfortune of everybody. Maybe we have to put ourselves into God's shoes and try to think how we would, as parents, fell if our own son had to die to save the rest of humanity. Food for thought...